So We Want To Sell Our Warren County Home. What's The Process to Get Started?Dear Liz, We've been getting your mailings for what seems like forever and feel like we already know you and Bill! We'd like you to sell our Warren County home, so how do we get started? What's the process to get our home on the market? Signed, Ready to Sell!

Dear Ready,As you may have guessed, we're REALLY happy to hear from you and finally get to meet you in person! Before we come out to meet with you the first time we're going to do our "homework"!

If you've been on the market before, we'll look at your past MLS advertising. We'll pull the county tax information AND look at recent Sold homes and what's your expected competition. We'll also be reviewing your local area for other pertinent factors (Local government issues? School problems? Major construction projects? etc.). We need to put on our BUYER hats to see the pros AND the cons from their perspective!

We'll set up a mutually convenient time to meet at your home to meet with you and assess what needs to be done to optimize your home for the market. And we're sorry, but this visit may mean some work for you! We may recommend some new paint, maybe some carpet, maybe putting away some personal items and collections! Perhaps a little yardwork and prepping the front entrance area especially! And yes, maybe even ask you to store your favorite lounge chair! We don't lightly ask you to spend money to get ready, but trust us, those dollars may be some of the best you'll EVER spend! Buyers mentally subtract WAY more than the actual cost of the change, and magnify how serious the issue is. Let's not even give them the chance to think about it!!!

When we meet, we'll also give you a FULL review of how we'll work together to market your home & what our recommendations are for the pricing strategy! We'll also provide you a net proceeds sheet so you'll know what your minimum price to sell is to break even. If we're all in agreement to proceed, then we'll work on an optimal time for you to come on the market.

When you're ready, we'll come back for another meeting to finalize everything. We'll do all the necessary paperwork: listing contract, property disclosure forms, etc. Most likely Bill will take care of these along with the MLS information sheets while I move around your home getting all the photos I'll need to best present your home to the public. And don't mind if you hear me calling for Bill to come move a piece of furniture or two to make those rooms look even MORE appealing :) (And don't forget, we'll need a key for the front door to put in the lock box).

Now here's the plan, we need a couple of days to get ALL our preparation work done BEFORE putting your home in both our local MLS, Cincinnati AND Dayton. The pictures will be totally processed, the visual tour ready, all the marketing remarks prepared to publish. We DON'T want the buyers first impression of your home to be "NO PHOTO SUPPLIED"! They'll say NEXT so fast you'll hear a sonic boom!! So the day you go on the market and in MLS, as soon as our office admins enter you, your pictures, write up, disclosures and visual tour will be attached! We're going to WOW those buyers right out of the gate!

From here, the rest of the pieces of your full marketing plan start to fall into place! We'll have flyers printed for your sign box, and once in MLS and we can print the info sheets, we'll be making your inside presentation booklets. Over the next 2-3 days depending on how quickly each website pulls in the initial data, we'll start amplifying your appearance on our own website, Realtor.com, Remax.com, post ads on Craigslist and quite a few other websites. Add a blog post or two for an extra shot of Google attention and we're off!! If the buyers are looking and your home fits them, they WILL find you!

And from there, we'll keep monitoring the market conditions, getting you showing feedback and otherwise continuing to provide you guidance until we get that contract that gets you SOLD!